Native Speaker
Braids
we spent christmas together though you probably don’t know that. during the afternoon, I read a book while
listening to you and the book was the collected stories of amy hempel and your cover art was three people calmly
sitting near in a giant ball of fire while hiding behind a tainted patterned glass.
two days later in an e-mail to someone I said, ‘I really like that braids album, it sounds like animal collective
except cuter. baby animal collective.’
the first two tracks you seemed excited and pulsating and full of life but then you slowed down and then you
sped up again. not sure why but I was reading at a faster pace when the faster tracks were playing. apparently
termites eat wood twice as fast when listening to speed metal which means that I have the psychological complexity
of a termite probably.
the second track paraphrases a line from a sylvia plath poem (eating men like air) which was nice because it
made me feel as if your entire ‘target audience’ was english major students and me which is an untapped market
though probably not the most lucrative one. have you ever read ‘for sylvia and for cheeseburgers’ by ted hughes? it’s
a poem in which ted hughes says that sylvia plath is dead now which means that she’ll never get to be a poet
laureate which is ‘too bad’ because she would probably have been ‘a hot one.’
now that I think about it every character in the amy hempel stories was amy hempel herself in some different,
arbitrary fictional context. as the book progressed some part of me really wanted amy hempel to grow bored of her
own style and alienate herself from it and try writing a short story about space goats with perfect night vision and the
main character is jazz poet bob kaufman, just for variety.
there’s a track called ‘lammicken’ and google tells me it means ‘clumsy’ and ‘slouching’ which was surprising to
me because up to that point I had pictured a lammicken as some sort of rare lung disease related to chicken. I have
‘an inoperable lammicken.’ also I keep thinking that ‘glass deers’ are a magical species of deers that live ‘up north’
near ‘igloos’ and that the mortal enemy of the glass deer is a colored zircon diamond wolf of some kind.
fhe first track is called lemonade and the last line goes ‘all we really want to do is love’ I think which is true but
not just people and ourselves but also things, baby animals and abstract concepts. native speaker by braids is a
thing, a baby animal and an abstract concept that feels good to love.
This article originally appeared in Volume 31, Issue 17, published January 4, 2011.
